Three special dates that shaped The Northern Echo

August 3, 1977

In the 1970s, The Northern Echo was selling 121,000 copies a morning, making it the largest-selling regional morning paper in the country.

But the decade was typified nationally by growing industrial unrest leading up to the winter of discontent of 1978-79.

In the Darlington home of the Echo, there was tension over union demarcation then a closed shop agreement which led to a dispute with national ramifications.

On August 3, 1977, the dispute boiled over into a full-blown strike, with both journalists and printers joining a picket line in Priestgate. For the first time in the paper’s 107-year existence, it failed to be printed.

It had been published all through the Great Strike of 1926, when rioters had stoned the Echo’s office and its delivery vans but readers, in those pre-television days, were eager for news of the latest developments.

It had been published all through the Second World War, although there were two nights – May 20 and October 21, 1941 – when it was printed on the Durham County Advertiser’s press in Durham. These were tests to see if the Echo could survive if the Luftwaffe took out Priestgate.

It had even been published through an electricity power cut of October 27, 1954, that dimmed all Darlington. Power was restored just minutes before the entire paper was abandoned.

The strike of 1977 ended that run. It lasted until December 16, 1977, when the press coughed back into life, but it is still in the record books as Britain’s longest-running news strike.

June 30, 1990

Big pithead fire at Shildon is the headline coming off The Northern Echo's press in Priestgate – can anyone date this picture for us?

The Echo was first published on the Priestgate/Crown Street corner on January 1, 1870, on a secondhand press from Otley. The office, built by Sir Charles Starmer during the First World War, was designed to accommodate a huge press, but by the end of the 20th Century an increasingly computerised press was the most expensive part of a newspaper operation, and the Echo’s owners decided it should be printed on a faster, full colour press located in York.

And so, after 120 years, Priestgate printed its last copy.

Very important people inspect the Echo's last press, a Viscount Crabtree, installed in 1968, which printed every night until 1990

Managing editor David Kelly was there on that last night. “A klaxon would sound each time the press was crawled to allow a plate to be positioned and, that night, the siren seemed to wail from the heart of the press. It is, of course, completely silly to believe a machine has a soul, but that is how it seemed.

“As its speed increased, my abiding memory is of the vibration that spread up from the gantry through my body. The press was possessing us for the last time, and when it was finally racing, I must confess my eyes were watering.”

All Priestgate shuddered to the press’ industrial rhythm and with it beating, Darlington, known to the world as the birthplace of the railways, had a throbbing reminder that it was also the home of the first halfpenny morning newspaper – the start of another communications revolution.

February 24, 2007

Market Stall worker Marko Karadzic reading the new compact Northern Echo. Picture: Chris Booth

The size of the Echo varied in its early years, depending on whatever secondhand press its first printers could get to work and whatever size paper reels they could lay their hands on. From about 1872 it settled as a broadsheet paper, although of varying depth.

However, after 125 years, editor Peter Barron took the momentous decision to go tabloid – or 'compact' as it was then called. There were complaints, particularly from people who owned cats whose litter trays could no longer be lined with the smaller paper, but people with average-sized arms and crowded breakfast tables came to like the more convenient size, which was just a couple of centimetres smaller than the first Echo of January 1, 1870.